Version 2 moved the needle forward, focusing around the alignment of IT services with business requirements and offering best practices for applications management, support, delivery and security. Best Practice for Business Perspective: The IS View on Delivering Services to the Business was added to ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) in version 2.

The next step in helping mature these relationships will be centered around business-IT integration, the goal being to achieve a level of synergy so seamless that business wont be disrupted when architecture or processes undergo change.

One of the ways ITIL version 3 will help organizations achieve that seamless integration is by promoting a lifecycle approach to IT service management across books, from an overall perspective of service strategy to service design, service transition, service operations, and continual service improvement.

Avoiding Silos

Thats a departure, says Ken Turbitt, global best practices director at BMC Software, a provider of business service management and network and systems management software.

The old [ITIL] books were done in such a way that you could pick and choose which elements you should align with, he says. So, if an organization thought it was doing well with change management, but knew it had issues with problem management and release management processes, it could focus solely on those two areas. But "what happened a lot is that the elements were done in silos, and done in isolation. The integration of the processes across the whole was very sporadic, Turbitt says.

Today (Jan. 22) marked the deadline for ITIL version 3 reviewers, including Turbitt, to submit comments on the updates. It still will be months before the books publication  April at the earliest. In the meantime, organizations that have already started on their ITIL journeys neednt put the brakes on those ventures. In fact, businesses that have begun to move toward ITIL are in a good position to adopt Version 3s innovations.